LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      The voice seemed to be coming from a long way away, as if she were at the bottom of the ocean and someone was calling to her from the shore.

      “Mariella! Mariella! You must wake up.”

      But she didn’t want to wake up. Memories were leaden clouds on the edges of her mind. Something unpleasant hovered at the periphery, and subconsciously she knew that stirring would mean facing it. And she didn’t want to do that.

      “Wake up!”

      The sound of a door being pushed open punctuated her sleep, and then she was being shaken, roughly, her shoulders gripped by determined hands. She startled, her eyes flying open.

      The housekeeper, Vanessa, hovered above her, her dark hair in an unusual state of disarray, as though she, too, had been woken by the strange noises that were bouncing through Casa de Catalina.

      The middle of the night surrounded them, but it offered little protection. “I tried to keep them away. I told them you were asleep.”

      Mariella shook her head, and reached up, wrapping her fingers around her housekeeper’s wrist. She dislodged the grip Vanessa had on Mariella’s shoulder but kept ahold of the young woman’s hand. “Told who I was asleep?”

      “The men. They’re coming. They’re coming to get you!”

      Mariella’s lips curved downward in an unmistakable sign of bemusement, but there was a loud noise from just outside her bedroom. It came out of nowhere, like a hurricane that had dropped on a hay plain. “Mariella Santiago-Marshall.” A man in a dark suit entered the room and waved a flashlight around dramatically, despite the fact that a light switch was right beside him. “Stay where you are.”

      She pulled at the crisp white bedsheet, lifting it up to her chin with one hand while the other held Vanessa’s, now out of fear rather than a desire to comfort the domestic.

      But she was Mariella Santiago-Marshall, and powerful blood pounded through her veins. Fear was something she would not debase herself by expressing. Not to these strangers who had seen fit to invade her home.

      “Like hell I will,” she muttered under her breath before assuming a mask of total control. “Perhaps you gentlemen would like to tell me just what is going on?”

      The man who’d walked in first approached the bed. Unwanted fear slammed against Mariella. There was evil in his face. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t want him in her house or anywhere near her. Why hadn’t Vanessa been able to cope with this and get rid of them all? And where was Harrison?

      Darkness cloyed at her throat as she thought of her husband. The presentiment of disaster hovered nearer.

      “We have a warrant to search the premises.”

      “A warrant?” Adrenaline spiked the taste of salt and aluminum in her mouth. “Whatever for?”

      “Links between your family and the Fixer.”

      The Fixer.

      Her stomach contracted as the ominous name slammed through her consciousness.

      “I don’t know anything about the Fixer,” she said, dropping the bedsheet and pushing to standing. Vanessa hovered beside her, and Mariella took comfort from her proximity, though the woman was slight and looked almost as terrified as Mariella felt.

      The man’s smile was supercilious. Mariella’s manicured fingers itched to slap it off his face. “That’s what we’re here to determine, ma’am.”

      It was the ma’am that did it. The way it was spoken with such contempt. “No.” Mariella was used to being listened to. In her business, when she wanted something, she got it. And usually ten times over.

      Her impact wasn’t lessened by the current circumstances. The men who were engaged in searching her drawers, pulling shoe boxes out of her wardrobe and tossing them carelessly onto the carpeted floor, and even the ones on their bellies, scrambling under the bed, paused to give Mariella their

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